


Home Life

by Mythwine



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, Men of Letters Bunker
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-09-20
Updated: 2017-11-25
Packaged: 2019-01-01 03:19:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 8,119
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12147510
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mythwine/pseuds/Mythwine
Summary: How do you make a place into a home?Set vaguely in Season 9, but no references to Gadreel or the Mark of Cain.  Just the Winchesters living in the Men of Letters bunker.  Sam's POV.





	1. The Bunker is not Sam's Home

“Dude!” Sam said in disgust to the site that greeted him when he stepped into the kitchen; the cloud of fruit flies that jumped off the counter and the smell like something had died in there while they were gone. 

“Guess the trash needs to be taken out,” Dean agreed. “I vote it’s your turn.”

“You couldn’t have done that before we left?” Sam griped.

Dean pointed at the bananas on the counter, yellow with dark spots, but not rotten or anything. “Those are yours.” He waved at the fruit flies who were settling back in. “So that’s on you.”

Sam rolled his eyes. Dean’s ‘logic’ had been dictating unpleasant tasks to him for years, so he wasn’t exactly surprised or anything. With a put-upon sigh, he tied up the kitchen trash bag, which clearly did have some awful thing rotting in it.

“Besides, I don’t see why I have to do all the cleaning here,” Dean continued. “You eat, you use the kitchen; you can take the damn trash out from time to time. You only have to take it to the garage, anyway; I’ll haul it out to the dump later.” 

Dean did kinda have a point, but Sam didn’t really want to acknowledge that, so he grabbed the trashbag and headed for the garage. It’s not like he felt he was too good to do chores or anything like that. He wasn’t a naturally lazy person, and he could keep his own space clean. In fact, on the road, he felt like he put more effort into that than Dean, who was just as happy to leave a tip for housekeeping and call it a day.

But for some reason, Dean had become very dedicated to their new ‘home,’ and therefore took on a lot of the cleaning and other tasks that needed to get done when you actually lived somewhere rather than just squatted for a time. If Sam were honest with himself, he hadn’t exactly been pulling his own weight here, and Dean probably was right to call him out for it. It was just… 

It was too quiet in the bunker. Dean seemed bothered that Sam wouldn’t think of the bunker as their home. Wouldn’t move in, decorate, make it personal. But Sam didn’t feel at home there, and no amount of ribbing by his brother was going to change that. When he lay down to sleep at night in his room (his own room) in the bunker, he could only think that it was…awfully quiet there. And he wasn’t comfortable. 

Sure, it made sense to stay there. It was their own private fortified library and endless supply of rare resources. It was warded against almost everything, difficult to find by magical or technological means. It was theirs, and it was perfect. Mostly. 

But…

Sam was used to sleeping in a motel room next to a highway, with the constant night traffic noises, light from the street lamps peaking around the curtains, and his brother’s snoring from the bed next to him. He wasn’t used to dark and quiet. Quiet didn’t seem…right. 

It had been weird. When Dean came to fetch him from Stanford, unceremoniously uprooting his entire life in a single weekend, Sam had been annoyed by his brother’s noise. The Impala wasn’t exactly a quiet ride, and Dean liked to play the music loud enough to drown out the engine noise. Sharing a bedroom with him for the first time in years had been…disconcerting. He felt as if he were drowning, unable to cordon off anything as his own, completely surrounded by a room with walls decorated by their father and all of the stuff being ‘theirs’ again, rather than ‘his’ or ‘Dean’s’. It bothered Sam that he wasn’t able to make any of his own decisions any more, being subjected to Dean’s life in a total immersion that Dean seemed nigh oblivious to. 

And then Jess had died. He’d come home to an empty house, thinking she was just in the shower, and for one blissful moment he’d enjoyed the peace and quiet. No Dean, no obnoxious noise, no invasion of his personal space. Finally, back at his own place, in his own bed, where he could define everything in the room as ‘mine’ and no one would mess with it…until something dripped on his face and he just had time to wonder what that rotten smell was when he looked up and saw Jess. 

Dean’s noise had been a comfort of sorts after that. Dean obviously knew he was not okay watching his murdered girlfriend burn to death because whatever had targeted him as a baby was back. But other than being oddly solicitous and very distracting, Dean hadn’t really seemed to know what to do about that. So he’d just been himself, dragging Sam from place to place, case to case, pushing him at girls if they noticed him first, making a normal everyday life out of what Sam could only see as his own shattered and arrested life. And…somewhere along the way, Sam had bought into it. He hadn’t even seen that Dean was terrified at having lost their father. He seemed so confident they would find him, and Sam was so preoccupied with mourning Jess, that he just accepted Dean’s outlook without questioning. He told people he was on a roadtrip with his brother, just taking some time off from school, but that felt like a lie the more he said it. 

There was a comfort in waking up at night and hearing his brother breathing. It meant he wasn’t alone, it meant that Dean was still alive, and after just a month of being on the road, Sam was used to it. Sure, Dean was obnoxious and annoying and there were a zillion things he hated about being on the road with his brother. (Not the least of which was Dean drunkenly stumbling into their room late at night and waking him up, only to collapse snoring while Sam was left wide awake. Sam hadn’t even had to put up with that in _college._ ) But…it was still a lot better than being alone. And despite all the annoyances of travelling, they really did work well together. 

It wasn’t like working a case with their father. Dean wanted to be their Dad, to take charge and give the orders and treat himself as the expert. But he did not rile Sam up nearly as much as their old man always had. Dean, at the end of the day, viewed Sam as his partner – they were in this together. Sure, he would never let Sam forget that he was the OLDER brother, but… It was just different, that was all. And so even though Sam had spent most of his life fighting against becoming a hunter, despite his father’s training, he found himself not minding the life so much when it was just him and Dean. After they lost their dad, there really wasn’t any question of Sam going back to school or leaving again. And despite himself, he started counting on Dean’s reliability, even the stuff that annoyed him, as his constant in this life. The first night in the Men of Letters bunker…he couldn’t sleep. It was too quiet, too sterilized, too…not his life on the road with his brother. 

Sam knew he would never have a home again, not really. No place would ever feel ‘his’ the way his rooms at Stanford had. Even when he had been with Amelia in Texas, it had been her place. And part of him was very leery to the entire concept of settling down and making a new home, with his brother or with someone else. That left him disappointing Dean every time Dean tried to make the Men of Letters bunker into their home, but he didn’t really know how to explain to his brother that it was just too quiet and still, and he didn’t really feel at home unless there was more of Dean’s noise…so he called the Impala home and hoped Dean would accept that, as Dean would never deny that he loved his baby more than the bunker. Truce. But maybe he could make more of an effort and meet Dean part way on this. Because he was going to start feeling like a jerk if he let Dean do all of the work around here, and being a jerk was clearly Dean’s job.


	2. Entertainment

They were a half hour from Lebanon, doing a supply run in Downs, KS, when Sam got the idea. They were just getting the basics, groceries and ammo, when he saw an electronics store and insisted on stopping in. Dean looked at him oddly, but followed. The radio inside the store was playing the Stones’ “Gimme Shelter,” not some crappy pop song, so Sam took that as an encouraging sign. 

“What do we need in here?” Dean asked, looking around curiously despite his earlier quip about window shopping and girlfriends. 

“I thought we could use a stereo system,” Sam said, and hoped he wouldn’t regret this. 

Dean looked at him funny. “Hold up. Are you planning to play your emo crap in the bunker? Because if so, you can just stop this right now. I’m happier not knowing what’s in your headphones, dude.”

“What, you want to keep listening to 1940’s records?” Sam retorted. The bunker did have a decent collection of those, but aside from a few classical pieces and some old-time country, he had no real interest in the big band selection. 

“Okay, fine, we can look at stereos.” It wasn’t like there was much of a selection here, so if the price was reasonable, it was easier to agree than fight over it. “But I still get to choose what we listen to,” Dean insisted.

“What, it’s not enough that you get to choose the music when you’re driving?” Sam asked, annoyed. 

“My music is just better, Sammy, so you can deal with it.” 

Sam shook his head. But if the entire point of this exercise was trying to recreate their life on the road while they were in the bunker…then maybe he could suffer through Dean’s music if it meant chasing away the quiet from time to time. 

They did pick one out, and while Dean wanted to ask questions about the speakers, Sam just made sure it had a CD player. When they got back, they set it up in the library, next to the old record player, so they could listen to music when they weren’t doing research, if they wanted to. 

In the weeks and months that followed, Sam made a habit of picking up CDs when they were out. He wanted to build up their music collection, because the bunker didn’t exactly have good radio reception. He got the stuff he’d listened to while he was studying in college, mostly instrumental stuff that wasn’t distracting, and one crappy “Best of the 90's” CD from a checkout display. He would have picked up things that he had on his iPod, but that seemed redundant, so he just got some blank CDs and made copies of what he wanted from the computer. A pretty silly extraneous step, but he knew Dean would be less likely to veto it in hard copy, for whatever reason. He didn’t care much for new music, but he did get Bastille’s _Bad Blood_ (he could always listen to it while Dean was out or something). But when he brought home Zeppelin’s _Coda_ , he realized he was at least partially recreating Dean’s cassette collection. 

Dean didn’t like music while he was reading. Or rather, if Sam put music on, Dean either complained or stopped even pretending to do research. But he didn’t always leave the room, either, so Sam figured that was acceptable. Sam would never have bothered with a stereo himself – he would have just gotten some decent speakers for his laptop. But he knew Dean would like the stereo better, and he felt justified the first time he saw Dean shuffle through the CDs and pick one to put in. Granted, he complained about the crappy selection first (“Dave Matthews? U2? Really, Sam?”), but new CDs started showing up after that, and Dean would play music even when Sam wasn’t around. Somehow, it made the bunker less grim to hear music in the library, and Sam couldn’t find it in himself to complain when Dean played the music that Sam had been complaining about for years. It felt familiar. 

***

“Loser cleans up,” Dean announced smugly, leaning back. 

Sam breathed out heavily, but gathered up the poker chips without complaint. “I was thinking,” he began.

“Always dangerous, better not hurt yourself,” Dean quipped immediately.

He seemed to be in a good mood, though winning a poker game against his little brother (or anyone, really) would do that to him. And they weren’t on a case at the moment, so it seemed as good a time to discuss this as any, Sam thought. 

“No, really, man, I was thinking that we could, uh, maybe let other hunters know about the bunker.”

“Timeout,” Dean said, sitting up. “No way.” 

“Just hear me out,” Sam insisted. “We’ve had Kevin and Charlie here. And of course Cas. So it’s not like we’re keeping this place a secret. But with all these resources, is it really fair to other hunters not to let them see this?”

Dean shook his head. “I don’t trust other hunters. Dad always kept his distance.”

“But Bobby…”

“Bobby was different,” Dean said immediately. “But think about it, man. Whenever we meet other hunters, they do tend to try to kill us. Gordon. Walt and Roy. And then there’s the ones we wind up getting killed. Gordon again. Martin. Rufus. Even Pastor Jim. Ellen and Jo…. We’re not exactly good luck. I mean, just who were you thinking of letting know about this place?”

“Well, Jody and Alex, for one.” Sam started, somewhat relieved that Dean didn’t point out that that was really two. “And Garth.”

Dean frowned. “I’m happy with talking to Garth on the phone,” he said. 

“What, because of the whole werewolf thing?” Sam asked. “Or is it the hugs?”

“Yes, that, and because of the company he keeps these days. Garth may be fine, but if he lets this location out…well, I don’t really want the whole hunting community and all of the werewolves in the country to know where we are.”

“What about Krissy, then? If she and her friends ever need somewhere to hole up, you’d let her, right?”

“If she asked, sure, but she ain’t exactly asking. We’re not opening up a home for wayward youths here, Sam. What brought all this on, anyway?” he asked, taking a swig of beer and trying to invite Sam to keep talking.

“Look around, Dean. We’re sitting in the most impressive collection of supernatural lore in existence. Don’t you think that means anything?”

“Yeah, I think it means that the more people who know about this, the more likely we are to be murdered in our beds. I’m not ready to send up a flare and let people know what we have here. If someone has questions on a case, they could ask us. And then, sure, I’d do what I could to share all of this,” he gestured around. “Or if someone we know has to hide for a while, and I mean really hide. But that’s just it. I’m not looking for friends. I’m not inviting people here unless there’s a damn good reason to do so.”

“So you don’t trust Jody Mills?”

“Course I do. She’s good people. And if she needed help, she’d ask us. So, you know, door’s open.”

“But you’re not issuing any invitations.”

“Damn straight,” Dean said, and that conversation ended. Sam wasn’t really surprised, but he was still trying to figure out whether or not he was disappointed. After all, make the place safe enough, and it was just a fancy cage. He was beginning to wonder what Dean wanted out of life…and if that had changed any in the past few years.

***

Sam started making breakfast. Not every day, but from time to time. They had cereal, if they wanted it, and he could heat up water for oatmeal. And Dean didn’t care what he put in the fruit and veggie bins in the fridge, so long as there was plenty of room for beer in there, so he could have oranges or grapefruit if he wanted. But he found he liked it when they got breakfast when out on a case, so occasionally having something hot when they were at the bunker would be nice, too.

The first time, he made pancakes. They seemed simple enough; just follow the directions on the mix. But the pan must’ve been too hot or something, because he burned the first batch. The rest turned out okay though, and Dean didn’t complain about some of them being burnt (he just drowned them in syrup). Sam moved on to French toast, scrambled eggs, sausage, and bacon. If he made fruit salad, Dean would just snort and get himself cereal. One time, he even made English muffins with eggs and sausage and cheese, but that seemed like a lot of effort when you could get the same thing at any rest stop for like $2. Dean always showed up immediately with the smell of meat cooking, so they wound up eating together rather than just both wandering in for coffee whenever they woke up. Sam found he enjoyed those mornings, because even if they didn’t talk much over breakfast, it was nice to make food he actually wanted to eat, even if it was just toast. And Dean started making sure they had breakfast things, so he’d always pick up sausage links or something when he did a food run. A cast iron waffle maker showed up in the cabinet. And Sam once opened the fridge to find a dozen organic brown eggs, to his complete bewilderment. When he asked, Dean had just shrugged. “Those were the most expensive eggs they had, so I figured it was the fancy shit you like.” And that was when Sam realized that Dean was trying to make sure that the things they had were…nice. There hadn’t been any $.10 packets of ramen in the bunker yet. They didn’t go to fancy grocery stores (there was exactly one grocery store in Lebanon, and it didn’t have a lot of variety), but Sam would shop at a farmer’s market if they were on their way home from a job, and Dean let him have complete control over produce selection anyway. 

Sam hadn’t even realized Dean always washed their breakfast dishes, until he tried to do it one morning only to have Dean shoo him away. “Nah, man, you cooked breakfast, I can clean up.” And he turned back to the sink, tunelessly singing something that Sam should probably recognize but didn’t at first. And that was when Sam remembered that he’d been taking it for granted that Dean would do all of the cleaning around here. He should probably pitch in a little more. So the next time Dean made dinner (throw-everything-in-a-pot-and-call-it-chili), Sam made sure he did the dishes that night. 

When they stopped in a Value Village after a hospital discharge to get some new non-blood-splattered clothes for Dean – Sam rarely found things his size in thrift shops, so he’d just buttoned up his jacket to hide the worst of the blood splatter this time – Sam bought an old blender. Dean teased him about making girly drinks with it, and Sam ignored him. Dean was probably thinking of piña coladas; Sam more had in mind smoothies, but he wasn’t planning to offer them to his brother anyway. Dean didn’t laugh when Sam used the blender to make milkshakes, though – instead, he told his brother how good they were, as if shocked that you could recreate such deliciousness in your own kitchen.

There were lines, though. Sam was never going to learn how to bake a pie. 

***

“Whatcha watchin’?” Dean asked, coming into the room behind him. His brother smelled like oil, so he’d either been cleaning the guns or working on the car. Sam glanced back; his dirty clothes indicated car. 

“Oh, it’s just a documentary,” Sam said, turning the laptop to face Dean.

“A nature show?” Dean asked.

“Yeah, it’s one of the BBC productions – really awesome photography.”

“Huh. I wonder how they film at night?” 

“They said they just stayed in the vehicles and the lions leave them alone.”

“No, I meant…never mind, I’m going to go clean up. Any thoughts on dinner?”

“We have some leftovers that are still good, I think,” Sam said, though Dean tended to think the food was still edible slightly longer than Sam was comfortable with. If not, he could just make himself a sandwich. 

“Oh, come on, thirty on one isn’t a fair fight!” Dean said, pausing to watch the lions take on an elephant. After the young elephant went down, Dean wandered back towards their rooms, presumably to shower. 

Sam watched to the end of the show a few minutes later, and then closed the video. 

The leftovers turned out to still be edible, so he heated them up in the oven and waited for Dean to come back. They ate in the kitchen, Dean enjoying the cold beer more than the reheated food, and Sam couldn’t blame him. The pasta was better the first time around. 

“So, do you want to watch a movie tonight or something?” Sam asked. Enjoying bad TV together was something they’d done a lot more of living in motels than they did living in the bunker. 

“Sure, what’d you have in mind?” Dean asked. 

“I dunno, I figured we’d find something online and make popcorn or something.”

“Great. Your room or mine?”

Sam blinked at his brother. Did he just ask…? Yep, that was his ‘I feel extraordinarily pleased with how clever I am’ look, so yes he did. “Dude!”

“What?” Dean was going to play this like Sam was being the ridiculous one. “I’m not going to sit in one of those hard chairs in the library to watch a movie. Not when there’s a perfectly good memory foam mattress in my room.”

“Okay. Uh, your room, then, I guess. I mean, unless you want to use one of the spare rooms?” 

Dean’s look made it clear he thought that was a dumb idea. “I’ll make the popcorn, you go ahead and set up your laptop. But no choosing the film ‘til I get there!” 

Sam walked into his brother’s room, and felt like he was intruding. If Dean weren’t here, he shouldn’t be in here, and that was just weird. They’d shared so many bedrooms over the years, why the sudden respect for his brother’s privacy? The place was clean. Dean hadn’t left dirty clothes all over or a pile of junk on the bed. It was even neatly made. Maybe that’s why Sam felt like he was supposed to keep out. He’d never really seen Dean keep a room this…neat. 

He shook his head, and plugged in the laptop. He sat down on Dean’s bed, and it still felt weird to be here. He cued up a few options, prepared for the inevitable fight over what they were going to watch to last longer than the popcorn would. “Hurry it up!” Sam called out into the hallway. How long did it take to pop popcorn?

Dean finally appeared with a bowl of popcorn and a six-pack. “Scoot,” he demanded, shooing Sam away from the right side of the bed. 

As Sam had predicted, there was some debate over what to watch, but it didn’t last very long. When it came out that neither of them had seen _Avengers yet,_ that’s what they opted for. 

“Man, I am so glad we don’t have to worry about alien invasions,” Sam said when it was over. They’d already had the _‘Who is your favorite Avenger?’_ discussion, with Dean predictably choosing Black Widow. 

Dean leaned over and knocked on the nightstand. “Dude, don’t say that, you’ll jinx us!”

“You don’t even believe in aliens,” Sam reminded him.

“Yeah, well, seeing is believing, and just our luck, they’ll pick *now* to show up. And fairies are just as bad. I don’t wanna go to any freaky fairy realms, either.”

“That’s just because they…”

“Shut up! I don’t trust fairies, okay?”

“Whatever. The film was pretty good.”

“Yeah, probably better in theaters, though. Your laptop doesn’t exactly have surround sound.”

“Hey, be my guest if you want to get the back-to-the-future TV working.”

Dean paused to consider it. “Not worth it. It’s probably black and white, and the screen is smaller than your laptop.” 

“Yeah, probably.” Sam stood up, and grabbed the empty bowl of popcorn. “Well, good night.” 

“G’night,” Dean waved at him, not moving. 

Sam left. He’d probably try to find them a case tomorrow.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The CD version of Zeppelin’s _Coda_ contains the song “Travelling Riverside Blues,” one song that is almost definitely on Dean’s Zeppelin mixtape. Not that the show can play that for us. Personally, I would have picked up _Physical Graffiti_. 
> 
> Bastille’s _Bad Blood_ (2013) begins with the question “How am I gonna get myself back home?” and has the song “The Things We Lost In the Fire” on it. I feel the album matches the mood of this piece well, even if I don’t necessarily picture Sam Winchester enjoying it.
> 
> The documentary Sam is watching is BBC’s _Planet Earth_ ; it’s the final scene from Episode 7: Great Plains.


	3. On the Road

The problem with the bunker was that, sure, it had all of this information accumulated over years and years…but that was just it. You could bury yourself in it, going over case reports from 70 years ago and lose any sense of time. It was a rabbit hole, and Sam had to keep himself from falling down it and losing track of the present day.  


But the unresolved cases on file were a bit too tempting to ignore, so he would look through them from time to time, see if there were any open-ended problems he and Dean could take care of. 

“I think I found us a case,” he announced when he heard Dean walk into the room. 

“Oh yeah? Whatcha got?” Dean asked. He sounded cautiously optimistic. Sam could remember way too many cases that started with Dean’s boundless enthusiasm ( _“Strippers, Sammy!”_ or _“What about a human by day, a freak animal killing machine by moonlight don’t you understand? I mean, werewolves are badass!”_ ), only to end with him wishing they’d never taken the job on in the first place. Dean was…less innocent these days, he supposed, or just knew how to curb his enthusiasm…that their jobs weren’t really likely to be fun, after all. 

“Might be nothing. But seems like a pattern. Between the missing person reports and the deaths, looks like it might be our kind of thing.”

“Where at?”

“That’s just it…not all in the same location. Seems whatever this is picks up and moves every 20 years or so. I found reports in the Men of Letters files dating back to the 1920’s.”

“They didn’t know what it was?”

“No, it was still an open case; no conclusions.”

“And it’s started up again?” Dean asked.

“Yeah. Near Cape Girardeau, Missouri. Scott County has a lot of missing teens. Maybe one a month.”

“Boys or Girls?” 

“Both. Seems to be more girls, though.”

“Huh. Match the lunar cycle?”

“No. And it doesn’t seem to be a werewolf. When they do find the bodies, there’s no report of missing hearts.”

“They could be leaving that detail out of the press. And we know not all werewolves stick to the full moon.”

“There’s a lot of other things it could be, Dean. The problem is, most of the bodies aren’t fresh when they find them, so it’s not clear what’s been done to them, if anything.”

“Where are the bodies being dumped?”

“The river, mostly. A couple turned up in the woods. And one was left in a cemetery.”

“Really? Well that is interesting. Okay, let’s check it out. But this could just be a serial killer.”

“Then why were the Men of Letters keeping track of it, do you think?”

“IF it’s the same thing. Well, let’s find out, yeah?”

“Okay. It’s about a ten hour drive from here, so you wanna leave now or in the morning?”

Dean shrugged. “Now’s fine. You pack the cooler.” 

***

“Ugh, I still smell like swamp mud.”

“Since when do you care what you smell like?” Sam asked his brother.

“Since I have to sit in a car with you for the next however many hours and you reek, too,” Dean shot back.

“Well, hose your boots off and change your clothes and maybe it won’t be so bad.”

One gas station with a do-it-yourself carwash later, and the brothers were more-or-less clean again. Good enough to hit the road, anyway. 

“Man, I am looking forward to a real shower when we get back. The water pressure in the bunker spoils me,” Dean said.

“Yeah, I guess,” Sam agreed.

“What?”

“It’s just…we must be getting old or something. Looking forward to showers?”

“It’s the simple things in life, Sammy,” Dean reminded him with a grin. “We’re still here, in one piece, and Scott County’s missing persons problem is under control. Gum?”

Sam took the proffered stick of gum wordlessly. He figured it wouldn’t hurt his breath. “Yeah. And I guess it was nice that for once, this wasn’t even a little bit human.”

“We’ve gotta come up with a better name for it, though. Water Panther? That sounds like a cute pet, not something that wants to kill you.”

“You’re thinking of sea monkeys. The Ojibwa call them…Mishebeshu,” Sam replied, checking his phone. “If that’s better.”

“Bless you,” Dean said. 

Sam just shook his head and stretched out as best he could in the seat. “Wake me if you get tired of driving,” he said.

It had been a fairly straightforward case for once. It hadn’t taken long to figure out that the previous sightings were all in towns along the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers. And apparently some of the missing teens had last been seen by friends hanging out at some bonfire on Marquette Island. Identifying the creature and how to kill it had been trickier, but the coroner said the bites were premortem and some of the bodies had traces of copper on them. A Chippewa legend recommended cedar, so they went with that.

It wasn’t often they came across something new, something outside their own experience, and so Sam was kinda riding high from figuring out a nearly hundred year old mystery and putting an end to the trail of victims left behind. If pond monsters would just mind their own business and not kill people, they’d never come to Sam and Dean’s attention in the first place. 

*** 

Sometimes, there was a longer lull than usual between cases. Other times, they kept up a flurry of activity, working cases back to back to back, barely spending any time in the bunker at all. Sam supposed he liked a…happy medium. Enough time to catch their breaths, but not so long that they got stir crazy. 

Not that going stir crazy was really the problem. It was more that…Sam and Dean made a great team as hunters. Working a case, they backed each other up, knew what to expect from each other, and were generally speaking on the same page (with some spectacular exceptions, but, you know…in general). Off a case? Sam was reminded that he and Dean were…really different. Unlikely to agree about anything. Made for some tense roommate situations when they were playing at being civilians. It was better for all involved if they stuck to the hunting, most of the time. Luckily, they’d both mellowed out over the years, and realized that some things just weren’t worth getting all that worked up over. Most of the time.

It was Dean’s idea. “C’mon, Sammy, we’ve been locked underground long enough. Don’t want you to turn into a troll if you don’t see the sunlight at least occasionally.”

“I don’t think that’s how that works,” Sam said, but he was smiling.

“Sure it is. C’mon, I’ve got the cooler packed, let’s go for a drive.”

Sam tilted his head for a moment before he agreed. ‘A drive,’ to Dean, could mean a cross country roadtrip or a short run into town. “Where are we headed?”

“Not far, c’mon.”

Sam shook his head and got up. Dean sounded downright eager, so it probably made sense to ask questions on the way at this point. “Alright, I’m coming.”

Turned out, Dean was not lying. They weren’t even leaving Kansas. He drove them down to Glen Elder, to the state park out by the lake. It was a beautiful day – sunny, with puffy clouds in the sky and not too blistering hot. They sat at a picnic bench watching the lake, and it turned out that Dean had packed both beers (which Sam expected) and hamburger fixings (which he had not) in the cooler. The park had grills, and so Dean made them dinner before it got too late and they lost the sunlight. Watching Dean grilling up burgers outside, Sam was reminded that there was a year of his life when Dean had had the chance to play at being domestic. He had no idea if Dean had done any grilling in the backyard at Lisa’s house, but he wondered now. Was this something Dean missed? He’d remembered now how eager Dean had been to man the grill at that ranch where they’d been waiting for the hellhounds. He’d thought then that it was just a ploy to avoid the crazy rich folks in the house or to cozy up to their pretty ranchhand boss, but maybe it was something Dean actually liked.

“Thanks for the dinner, man,” Sam made sure to say.

“Sometimes, I have some pretty great ideas,” Dean informed him.

“No argument here. We should do this again some time, take some downtime between jobs.” 

Dean looked at the lake. “You probably need a permit to go fishing here,” he said with a scowl. Sam figured they wouldn’t be back to Lake Waconda any time soon. Which was a shame, because this had been a nice afternoon.

***

“You know, we should clean out Dad’s old storage locker,” Sam said one day. 

“The one up by Buffalo?”

“You know another?” Sam asked.

Dean nodded. “Yeah, just our luck, someone will clean the place out and start some mischief.”

“I think the stuff would be safer here,” Sam said. 

Dean nodded, and worried his lip. “All that shit isn’t going to fit in the Impala,” he said, pointing out the obvious. 

“We could borrow a box truck,” Sam pointed out. “It’ll probably only take one trip.”

“Borrow,” Dean said with a smirk. “Sure.”

“We can abandon it near where it belongs, be careful to wear gloves, and as long as neither of us bleed on anything while we’re moving, it should be fine….”

“Lookit you, Sammy the criminal master mind. I’ll make an honest thief of you yet.”

“Shut up, jerk.”

“Bitch.”

***

Being on the road but not being in the Impala was weird. Sam was used to road trips. He knew what to expect. So many little details he’d just stored away in his memory over the years, a ‘how to’ guide on travelling the country. Sometimes he was tempted to start a blog. 

He knew not to expect to keep a radio station for long in the mountains, and that the extremes of the dial would tend to be radio preachers, classical music, and NPR. In some areas, the only music was country, and Dean knew all the classic rock stations in the cities up and down the east coast, so Sam hadn’t bothered with learning those. If he was ever driving by himself, he liked to find the college radio stations to hear something different. The fastest way to get Dean to turn off the radio was to land on a Top 40 station.

He knew that vending machines would have strawberry pop tarts in the winter time, and how they would have to bring cans of gasoline with them to cross the deserts out West (which they had on hand anyway for salt and burns, so it wasn’t usually an issue). He knew what times were too late to get food or gas in small towns. He knew that speeding on interstates near the state border with out-of-state plates was just asking for trouble, and that when speed limits dropped going through towns was where you looked out for the local speed traps. He knew the liquor laws in most states, and how and where you could get beer in a dry county. He knew when you had to start paying attention to winter weather if your path took you across the Rockies. He found it weirdly depressing to drive north-south through central Pennsylvania on US-15 with the skeevy rest stop bathrooms where you had to try really hard not to touch anything and a roadside adult video store seemingly every 50 feet. Motel 6’s were nicer the closer you were to their headquarters in Texas. Towns next to military bases were always reliably well-stocked with strip clubs, tattoo parlors, barber shops, and trucks with license plates from all over. 

Dean would choose their route based on favorite places to stop off, like the place where I-70 met I-68 with the fresh-baked pies (which Sam didn’t mind, because they had fresh local fruit, too, and clean restrooms), or the place just outside of Cedar Rapids where the one waitress would always give them a free meal and Dean a place to stay for the night (Sam minded that one a little more). Dean would choose Route 66 over the Interstate. There was a Winchester, Kansas not far from Lawrence, and a Winchester, Kentucky right outside Lexington, and a Winchester in northern Virginia that Sam had never been to, but seen signs for. Tennessee, New Hampshire and Indiana had towns named Winchester, too, and there was even a Winchester Lake in Idaho. But the only Winchester they’d ever driven out of their way to visit was the one outside Boston because it was in Middlesex County and Dean thought that was hilarious. 

But aside from knowing the country and knowing the roads and knowing Dean, it also turned out he knew the Impala. He knew how many miles it could go between fillups, and when they’d have to put air in the tires when the temperature first dropped at night and what sounds would worry Dean. He knew how to shove himself comfortably into the front seat and not feel squished, or how to fold his legs into the back seat and sleep. He knew how it handled in snow and how much gas to give it to get up a hill. He knew where the blind spots were. 

In short, driving a U-Haul sucked. Nothing was familiar and it felt like he was inching along even if he floored it. It died going up hills, and he felt as if he were driving blind every time he glanced up at the review mirror and remembered, right, box truck. He could not for the life of him get comfortable in the passenger seat, even though it technically had more leg room. Trying to park the thing was frustrating, and they couldn’t just leave it in a well-lit motel parking lot right off the highway unless they were asking for someone to break into it. At least they weren’t fighting a snowstorm or 90 degree heat to do this, but that was about all that could be said for this trip. Sam would be happy to never drive through Ohio again. 

But maybe, at the end of the day, Sam was just annoyed because for once in his life, he was moving, like a normal person…but he was just transporting a bunch of cursed objects and old weapons and childhood memories into the bunker, not moving furniture into a house. He wasn’t sure why he cared, but he did care, and it bothered him for some reason, and that just left him annoyed. He complained almost as much as Dean about the whole trip, so by the end, they were ready to rip each other’s throats out. 

It wasn’t until they were back to the bunker, all of Dad’s stuff stowed in storage and the U-Haul ditched, when Sam was in his own room, alone, that he realized the last time he’d moved had been when he’d moved Amelia into their house in Texas. Moving into the bunker was just the reminder that when he had given her up, he had given up all of that, forever. Dean might talk a good game about wanting Sam to get out of hunting someday, but ‘someday’ meant ‘after Dean’s death,’ and Sam never wants to see that day. So, he’ll continue to hunt with Dean for as long as they both shall live, and any dreams of a normal job or a normal life or a normal girlfriend will all have to remain just that – dreams.

Sam tries to be okay with that, but the way he’d reacted on the drive back suggests he’s not. And that means he shouldn’t ignore this. 

***

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter brought to you by Google Maps! The Winchesters have (obviously) spent a lot more time on the road than I have. Sam knows a lot more specifics about travelling the US than I could have guessed. The Motel 6 detail is really about Motel 8 and their headquarters in the southwest, but they're all Super8's now and owned by some conglomerate, so my data is dated. The Blue Goose Market in Hancock, MD (with its pies and fruit) is a real enough place - I just can't picture Dean Winchester willingly stopping at Breezewood on the way west to Pittsburgh, so this seemed a much more appealing pit stop. 
> 
> Everything I know about water panthers was the result of a quick google search. Apparently, you don't take canoes across the middle of the lake, and if you do - be prepared to hit it with a paddle. My father has been telling his granddaughter stories about pond monsters for years, though, so I had to include one. I do find it odd that, in a show about supernatural occurrences in the United States, there's not more reference to Native American stories and legends. Because, well...you would think.


	4. Personal Touches

The bunker meant different things to Dean that it did to Sam. Sam knew that. Purgatory had done something to Dean that hell had not. At first, he’d thought his brother had come back harsh and traumatized and angry, and that was all true, but he’d come back…differently. When Dean had returned from hell, he’d been broken up over having been turned into a torturer. When he came back from purgatory, he considered ‘enhanced interrogation’ to be…direct and efficient. There was…a calmness to his brother, an acceptance of who he was and what he’d done that he’d never found for the hell stuff. 

It wasn’t until Sam went to purgatory himself that he got it. Purgatory was brutal fighting, all the time. Dean had come back a soldier, but a victorious battle-hardened soldier. He didn’t feel unclean the way he did after Alistair and hell. Sam….Sam had had his fair share of being unclean, and he was in many ways thankful that Dean wasn’t trapped in that. But one thing all that fighting had done was to strip away any scrap of safety and trust Dean had ever felt. He couldn’t ever really relax when he first got back, always on high alert and barely sleeping. And when he did sleep, well….he still didn’t feel safe and was sleeping more lightly than Sam had ever seen his brother sleep. The slightest noise or disturbance had him at high alert. 

It wasn’t until after they moved into the bunker that Sam started to notice the difference. He wasn’t sharing a room with Dean, so he didn’t know how he was sleeping there, but his brother certainly seemed more rested. Less on edge. And…it was the little things. As often as Sam teased him for walking around the bunker in some dead guy’s robe, it was…a welcome change…to him sleeping fully clothed on top of motel beds. Not that Sam cared if Dean wanted to sleep in his clothes (personal comfort had never seemed important to Dean and the guy could sleep anywhere), but he was finally starting to understand that staying in a warded secret underground bunker made Dean feel safe in ways that even the Impala didn’t. And that…was something Sam wanted for his brother. 

The case in Cape Girardeau was what finally clued him in to what had changed. Because he started recognizing some of the places as they drove around, and started sifting back through his memory. “Hey, didn’t we work a case here before?” he’d asked his brother, because Dean had fewer memories that weren’t his or weren’t real and fewer gaps. And Dean had just looked at him out of the side of his eye and said, “What about it?” rather defensively. So that was when Sam remembered that Cape Girardeau was where Cassie, Dean’s old girlfriend from forever ago, lived. And yet Dean never mentioned her or suggested they should stop by and see her or attempted to ditch his brother and go off on his own for unstated adventures. 

It had been silly, really. He’d somehow thought that Dean was hooking up with girls just the same as always. He’d…not noticed the difference. Dean still smiled and flirted with all the women they interacted with, giving them plenty of appreciate looks and still getting phone numbers often enough. But while he would flash his brother the ‘I’ve still got it’ look of triumph every time…he never called them. He had been eager for action and quite vocal about it both before and after hell. But, for some reason, after purgatory, Dean was a lot more reticent. Not exactly a monk, but not exactly himself, either. It took Sam awhile to connect the dots. That sex meant…vulnerability…for maybe the first time in Dean’s adult life. That Dean didn’t feel safe anywhere and couldn’t relax. 

So Sam was curious how long it would be before Dean was trying to make up excuses and justify inviting some girl he just met to their secret batcave. So far, it hadn’t happened. Dean was very professional and guarded their secret location well – sure, he shared it with Charlie, and Castiel, and Kevin, but not just anyone. Sam was planning to tease him mercilessly and shut him down if he tried, but so far, there had been no opportunity. 

And, in the meantime, he was trying his best to be understanding of Dean’s wishes to make it their home. Because Sam might not want that, or have very mixed feelings about it, but apparently Dean needed a home base now.

The thing was… Dean had this bad habit of assuming that he and Sam had the exact same thoughts about things, the same likes, the same preferences. So unless Sam was extremely vocal about his difference of opinion with his brother, he would get railroaded into doing things Dean’s way, with Dean none the wiser that there had ever been a reason for a discussion in the first place. He didn’t even know he was doing it most of the time. Granted, there were plenty of times he did it on purpose, but part of the reason he always sounded so disgusted and said things like ‘Are we even related?’ when Sam veered off the acceptable path was…because Dean expected his own way to be the Winchester way, no matter how often Sam reminded him otherwise. 

Dean had assumed that hell was the same for both of them, when the truth was that Sam had no idea what it was to be worked over by Alistair, and Dean had no idea what it was to be trapped in the Cage with Lucifer (thank God). But probably not the same. Dean had also tried to push Sam at pretty girls right after Jess’ death. Sam had been horrified at the time, not knowing if Dean was playing a joke on him or trying to get him to move on and stop grieving as quickly as possible. But really, Dean had just been trying to let Sam cope the way he would have. Or something. Sometimes, the only thing worse than a helpful Dean was a panicked-you’re-going-to-leave-me Dean. 

And there were times that Dean just didn’t get it, but if Sam forced the issue, Dean would…accept it. The first few times Sam heard ‘Heat of the Moment’ after the Trickster’s cruel time loop, he’d flinched and gotten unreasonably angry, abruptly walking away or changing the radio station to get away from it. And at first, Dean had complained, ‘Hey, I like that song!’ and tried to turn it back. But Sam was adamant. He never wanted to hear that song again for the rest of his life, and he didn’t care if his brother wanted to mock him for it, he just _didn’t_. But it wasn’t until Sam walked out in the middle of questioning a teenage employee in a mall when it came over the speakers that Dean figured out that it was a big deal. And after that, he did his best to help ward off Asia. 

So, yeah, he would go along with this ‘The Bunker is our home now’ idea, for Dean’s sake, but he couldn’t quite bring himself to do it without putting up at least some resistance and voicing his protest. So Dean would know that his agreement meant something, and wasn’t automatic. Not this time.


End file.
